Participatory approaches that involve local communities in their own development have gained substantial support among international donors over the past quarter-century and have become increasingly important in the work of the World Bank. Community participation is an approach to development that can be used with any Bank lending instrument and across sectors. Projects can involve communities in different ways--by sharing information, consulting, collaborating, or empowering them. The process of involving communities in project activities is also expected to contribute in most cases to communi.
This is a country case study on Egypt undertaken as an input to an Independent Evaluation Group study of the World Bank's support for community-based development (CBD) and community-driven development (CDD) efforts. It is predominantly a desk study but involved also a field visit to the Matrouh Resource Management Project in association with an IEG Project Performance Assessment Report. Egypt represents a useful country case for five main reasons. First, it has recent participatory project interventions across quite a wide range of approaches. Second, Egypt is only relatively recently moving toward making participatory approaches central to development projects. Third, Egypt is a lower-middle income country with significant capacity and implementation skills at both government and community level. Fourth, in Egypt, there is a still quite undeveloped NGO sector compared to many other countries. Fifth, in many project areas there is an extremely conservative social environment, particularly in relation to the place of women, a contrast to some other case study countries. On balance, Bank performance on the participatory aspects of CBD/CDD approaches in Egypt has been largely satisfactory. There are five main findings with implications for action and one main recommendation. First, with respect to findings, some of the problems may arise from a weakness in identifying the core problem - the real underlying diagnosis - which generally seems to be weaknesses in public resource allocation and associated inefficiency in poverty impact. Second, sustainability is a major concern. Third, the intensive focus on community level processes may, in some cases, be diverting attention from important overriding policy issues. Fourth, there could be better coordination across projects at community level. Fifth, there are different approaches to decentralization reflected in the program with some projects supporting local government capacity and decentralization and others not supporting it, even arguably undermining it through alternative resource allocation routes.
'The Road to Results: Designing and Conducting Effective Development Evaluations' presents concepts and procedures for evaluation in a development context. It provides procedures and examples on how to set up a monitoring and evaluation system, how to conduct participatory evaluations and do social mapping, and how to construct a "rigorous" quasi-experimental design to answer an impact question. The text begins with the context of development evaluation and how it arrived where it is today. It then discusses current issues driving development evaluation, such as the Millennium Development Goals and the move from simple project evaluations to the broader understandings of complex evaluations. The topics of implementing 'Results-based Measurement and Evaluation' and constructing a 'Theory of Change' are emphasized throughout the text. Next, the authors take the reader down 'the road to results, ' presenting procedures for evaluating projects, programs, and policies by using a 'Design Matrix' to help map the process. This road includes: determining the overall approach, formulating questions, selecting designs, developing data collection instruments, choosing a sampling strategy, and planning data analysis for qualitative, quantitative, and mixed method evaluations. The book also includes discussions on conducting complex evaluations, how to manage evaluations, how to present results, and ethical behavior--including principles, standards, and guidelines. The final chapter discusses the future of development evaluation. This comprehensive text is an essential tool for those involved in development evaluation.
This publication offers a framework for the empowerment of people living in poverty throughout the world that concentrates on increasing people's freedom of choice and action to shape their own lives. Based on analysis of practical experiences, the book identifies four key elements to support empowerment: information, inclusion and participation, improved accountability and local organisational capacity. This framework is then applied to five areas of action to improve development effectiveness: provision of basic services, improved local governance, improved national governance, pro-poor market development, and access to justice and legal aid. It also offers twenty 'tools and practices' which concentrate on a wide-range of topics to support the empowerment of the poor.
An effective state is essential to achieving socio-economic and sustainable development. With the advent of globalization, there are growing pressures on governments and organizations around the world to be more responsive to the demands of internal and external stakeholders for good governance, accountability and transparency, greater development effectiveness, and delivery of tangible results. Governments, parliaments, citizens, the private sector, NGOs, civil society, international organizations and donors are among the stakeholders interested in better performance. As demands for greater accountability and real results have increased, there is an attendant need for enhanced results-based monitoring and evaluation of policies, programs, and projects. This Handbook provides a comprehensive ten-step model that will help guide development practitioners through the process of designing and building a results-based monitoring and evaluation system. These steps begin with a OC Readiness AssessmentOCO and take the practitioner through the design, management, and importantly, the sustainability of such systems. The Handbook describes each step in detail, the tasks needed to complete each one, and the tools available to help along the way."
Community-driven development boasts many islands of success, but these have not scaled up to cover entire countries. Binswanger and Aiyar examine the possible obstacles to scaling up, and possible solutions. They consider the theoretical case for community-driven development and case studies of success in both sectoral and multisectoral programs. Obstacles to scaling up include high economic and fiscal costs, adverse institutional barriers, problems associated with the co-production of outputs by different actors on the basis of subsidiarity, lack of adaptation to the local context using field-tested manuals, and lack of scaling-up logistics. The authors consider ways of reducing economic and fiscal costs, overcoming hostile institutional barriers, overcoming problems of co-production, adapting to the local context with field testing, and providing scaling-up logistics. Detailed annexes and checklists provide a guide to program design, diagnostics, and tools. This paper--a product of the Office of the Vice President, Africa Regional Office--is part of a larger effort in the region to improve understanding of community-driven development.
'Local and Community Driven Development: Moving to Scale in Theory and Practice' provides development practitioners with the historical background and the tools required to successfully scale up local and community driven development (LCDD) to the regional and national levels. LCDD gives control of development decisions and resources to communities and local governments. It involves collaboration between communities, local governments, technical agencies, and the private sector. Since the 1980s, participatory approaches have received new impetus via participatory rural appraisal, the integration of participation in sector programs, decentralization efforts of developing countries, and greater space for civil society and the private sector. This book traces the emergence of the LCDD synthesis from these various strands. 'Local and Community Driven Development' provides the theoretical underpinnings for scaling up, guidance on how to adapt the approach to the specific institutional and political settings of different countries, diagnostic tools, and step-by-step instructions to diagnose the national context, adapt policies, and expand programs. It will be a useful guide for rural and urban development practitioners, public administrators, and policy makers who wrestle daily with the problems the book addresses.
